You might be considering backing up your data but you don’t know what medium to use. But you now have a good choice of media unlike the early days of the personal computer. Then your only choice was a 5.25 inch floppy disk that held less than 100 kilobytes of data. Fast-forward to today when you can use higher density floppy disks, CDs, external hard drives, portable drives and much more. So you have the media to back up your important data.
While computer developers continually improved the storage media, the software engineers made great headway designing larger and larger programs. This meant the main hard drive on your computer also had to increase in size to manage the megabytes, then gigabytes of data bits contained in new applications.
As hard drives continue to increase in size, it means that you need backup storage holders which can hold the sheer amount of data you now have on your hard drive. I remember buying a 20MB hard drive, and after adding a few application programs, my system began to slow down, meaning I had to go out and buy one with a larger capacity.
Of course, you can buy as many hard drives, or CDs, or portable drives. But if you don’t commit to backing up your data at least once a month, or as often as it takes if you use your computer often, you are just risking losing your important information.
For sure, the size of application programs will continue to increase, unless the hardware engineers find a way to store more data in a smaller space. Obviously, this research continues, and we hear about improvements almost daily. But until the computer experts solve this battle of the bulge, we have to contend with buying more or larger storage holders to store our backups.